A little less than 5 years ago, editor Betsy Mason of WIRED Science called to ask whether I’d be interested in joining a new thing. WIRED was thinking about starting a science blog platform; she wondered whether I’d want to be one of the bloggers.

I did very much want: WIRED is both a great magazine, with inspiring storytelling and innovative design, and a brand with international reach. I was a bit perplexed why they would want me — scary diseases didn’t seem like a core interest for WIRED readers — but Betsy (now one of the authors of WIRED’s Map Lab blog) was confident the audience was there.

She was right. Superbug debuted Sept. 14, 2010 with a report on the “Indian superbug,” the antibiotic resistance factor NDM that was then just starting to move across the world. My second post explored “livestock MRSA,” the bacterium that originates in antibiotic overuse in agriculture, and the third looked at the shivery subject of a rare and deadly parasite transmitted by organ transplants. Those three posts pretty much defined Superbug’s turf: public health, global health, and food policy, with a sprinkle of dread. Readers responded with fascination and good will, then and to the more than 300 posts afterward.

Of which, as you’ve probably guessed, this is the last. Superbug has had a fantastic run, but there was only one other place I wanted to work, and I’m headed there. Next week, I’ll be joining National Geographic’s Phenomena under a new blog name.

(Worth saying: This move is coincident with Wired.com’s redesign, but is not at all related. Phenomena happened to have a rare opening.)

We’ve just passed a difficult and little-noticed anniversary: Last week, the Ebola epidemic in West Africa achieved its first birthday. Though the viral outbreak has been contained, it is still not under control: According to the World Health Organization, cases continue in Sierra Leone and are rising again in Guinea. Liberia was about to record an entire incubation period without a new case — a signal that the chain of person-to-person transmission might have been broken — but on Friday, it announced that it had found a single new case. How that woman became infected is unclear; it is possible that she represents, not a new outbreak, but a brief interruption in an otherwise promising trend.

It has been decades since there was an epidemic of this persistence and magnitude. No other Ebola outbreak matches it; nor does the 2003 epidemic of SARS. You would have to go back to the early days of HIV in the 1980s, or to the flu pandemics in 1968, 1957 or even 1918, to find an outbreak that sickened so many people, challenged international response capacity so much, and instilled such fear in other countries.

The anniversary has triggered reflections. Some criticize the response to Ebola for being inadequate and slow. Others — such as two talks at last week’s TED conference, one by Bill Gates — extract lessons that should inform responses to future epidemics.

Women gather in the Guinean village of Meliandou, believed to be Ebola’s ground zero. Jerome Delay/AP

Awareness of Ebola is picking up again in the United States: An American volunteer who was working in Sierra Leone has contracted Ebola and been medevac’d to the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center for Ebola treatment, and 10 more volunteers have been brought back to NIH, Omaha and Atlanta, to be examined at three of the four institutions in the US that have safe units to house them.

It’s a reminder that Ebola still persists in West Africa: In the last period the World Health Organization reported on (the 7 days ending March 8), there were 116 new cases. One bit of good news: None of them were in Liberia, for the second week in a row. But Guinea and Sierra Leone, where this volunteer was infected, continue to struggle.

And in a research paper published as that volunteer was being flown back, there’s a reminder that the Ebola outbreak is creating layers of health risks for those countries. In Science , researchers from NIH and four universities warn that Ebola’s interruption of other health services, such as childhood immunizations, threatens to create secondary epidemics of preventable diseases that would dwarf Ebola’s impact. In particular, they warn that there could be 100,000 additional measles cases, and up to 16,000 additional deaths, if health services are not restored.

Fast-food giant McDonald’s announced today that it will cease buying chicken raised with the routine use of most antibiotics, a move that seems certain to reframe the contentious debate about agriculture’s use of the increasingly precious drugs. The company set a deadline of two years to make chicken in its 14,000 US locations substantially antibiotic-free.

The announcement instantly makes McDonald’s the largest company by far to use its buying power to change how livestock are raised. Its 25 million US customers a day dwarf those at Chipotle Mexican Grill, which pioneered fast food using antibiotic-free meat, and also at Chick-fil-A, which announced a year ago that it would move to antibiotic-free chicken in five years.

McDonald’s new policy doesn’t solve the farm-antibiotics problem. The company is making the move only for chicken, not for beef or pork (though chicken is already the meat Americans eat the most). And the policy has important caveats. But since McDonald’s is the largest food-service buyer of chicken in America, this can’t help but affect other restaurants, and production of other meats.

In a phone interview, Marion Gross, senior vice president of McDonald’s North America Supply Chain, said the company made the move because customers have been asking for it. “This about meaningful action that is important to our customers,” she said. “We’re happy to be able to achieve this. This is not something new; we had our first antibiotic policy in place back in 2003, so it’s the evolution of a journey we have been on for some time.”

You might have missed it, because we’re barely talking about it in the United States, but the African Ebola epidemic has still not died down: the World Health Organization identified 99 new cases in its most recent status report. And as long as the disease persists, the possibility exists that it could spread back out of that confined area to other countries. Which makes it a good time to consider several new reports of what happened to US health care workers involved in responding to Ebola, and how that experience still affects their lives.

Short version: Of two who contracted Ebola and survived, one remains ill and fears she was manipulated, and the other, though well, feels he was misrepresented and stigmatized. Both worry their experience will dissuade others from volunteering in turn. And a major new government report backs them up.

A few years ago I happened to get introduced to a pair of filmmakers, Michael Graziano and Ernie Park, who were starting to explore the topic of antibiotic resistance. They had the same questions about resistance that I obsess over, and the same shock about how enormous the problem is: according to a recent estimate, 700,000 deaths every year, likely to rise into the millions if nothing is done.

They recognized their disbelief as the creative spark for a project, and three years later, have brought out Resistance, a documentary now available on iTunes. LV Anderson just said about it, in Slate:

Regardless of your preexisting interest in public health or food politics, once you learn a little about antibiotic abuse, you won’t be able to stop caring about it. Without antibiotics, many of the medical treatments that we take for granted would be impossible, and the speed and carelessness with which we squander these important drugs — on people who don’t need them and on livestock that really don’t need them — is downright infuriating… In talking-head interviews with well-chosen, highly articulate experts, Resistance explains the fundamental reason the incorrect use of antibiotics is so dangerous: Every time we use antibiotics, we give bacteria another chance to develop resistance to it.

I think Resistance is a fantastic exploration of the problem, but I am likely to be biased, because I am in it. But I realized as I watched it that there was a lot about the documentary that I didn’t know: how it came to be, why the stories within it were chosen, and whether making it changed the filmmakers’ life.

Here’s an edited chat with Michael Graziano about making the film.

Maryn McKenna: Your previous film, Lunch Line, was about school lunch and nutrition. Antibiotic resistance seems a long way from that. What got you interested?

Michael Graziano: I was hoping to get rich as quickly as possible. I calculated that if I spent three years making a film about science and public health the money would start pouring in.

Last week I broke the story that contract chicken farmer Craig Watts, who had let animal-welfare activists film in the barns where he raises poultry for Perdue Farms, filed for whistleblower protection against the company because he felt retaliated against. In his complaint — made to the Department of Labor under the provisions of the Food Safety Modernization Act — Watts said that the condition of the chicks Perdue delivered to him compelled him to raise “adulterated or misbranded food” for consumers, and that when he attempted to reveal this, the company harassed him with inspectors’ visits.

When I posted on Watts’ complaint, which has the form of a lawsuit though it is filed with a federal agency not a court, I said I’d update once I got reaction from the company or the industry. I’ve received their reactions now and, since it’s been a few days, it seems more fair to break them out in a separate post, rather than adding to last week’s.

Short version, with details below: Perdue and the National Chicken Council both say that Watts — who has not lost his contract with the company — is not being retaliated against, but needs guidance to do a better job raising the chickens he is sent.

Back in December I wrote about a chicken farmer who took the extraordinary step of inviting animal-welfare activists into his barns to document the conditions under which his contract compels him to raise his birds. The farmer, Craig Watts of North Carolina, has raised chicken for Perdue Farms for two decades and has often been a top producer for them; he was not an outlier, but someone well within the corporate farming system. Yet it weighed on his conscience that even when he did his best to care for them, the birds seemed deformed and unwell. “The consumer’s being hoodwinked,” he said at the time.

The video he made with the group Compassion in World Farming has been viewed more than 1.6 million times. Watts continues to raise chickens for Perdue; the company did not yank his contract. But he claims he has been subjected to a campaign of retaliation from Perdue as a result, with very frequent visits from a variety of inspectors, and so he has taken a second extraordinary step. He has filed a federal complaint claiming whistleblower protection, alleging that he was forced to violate laws that protect consumers against “adulterated or misbranded” food.

Watts was not the first chicken contract farmer to speak out — Carole Morrison, a Maryland contract farmer, appeared in the documentary Food, Inc. and lost her livelihood as a result — but he’s almost certainly the first to strike back.

Complainant has observed an increase in the number of chicks placed on his farm carrying bacterial infections. As a result, Complainant believes that Respondent has not adequately controlled sanitation in its hatcheries to prevent birds from developing infections while at the hatchery, and is not culling sick birds from flocks at the hatchery with sufficient care to prevent the introduction and spread of diseases among the flocks placed on his farm. Additionally, Complainant believes that because Respondent crowds too many birds into each house, the birds do not have adequate room to move around freely, causing them trample each other to access water and food, which in turn leads to scratches and increased risk of infection. Moreover, Respondent prohibits Complainant from administering antibiotics and other medications to sick birds, and Respondent has refused to administer drugs to the birds when Complainant has sought help dealing with apparent outbreaks of disease among flocks placed on his farm.

Watts and his attorneys claim protection under the recent Food Safety Modernization Act, which added whistleblower “employee protection” provisions to the thicket of laws that govern food safety in the United States.

It’s notable that, in the complaint, Watts doesn’t ask for much: He doesn’t seek punitive damages, for instance, just attorneys’ fees and legal costs. Mostly what he asks is to continue to farm. After he went public, the poultry industry responded that the conditions in the video were the result of his poor farming practices; Watts says the first inspectors’ visits were within hours of the video going live, and continued “almost daily” since then, 23 times in the past two months. According to him, he was put on a “performance improvement plan,” and the complaint asks for that to be reversed, and for an end to any “retaliatory increased inspections.”

This is a lot of legalese, but the key facts are these: Most of the meat we eat in the US is raised in conditions that most consumers cannot see. This farmer felt those conditions were injurious to animals and bad for eaters. He opened the doors on his small corner of the industry in the hopes of changing it, and he wants to keep those doors open. Whistleblower protection might help him do that. I reached Watts quickly by phone, and he said: “I want there to be some avenue for farmers to be protected, so that they don’t have to be walking around on eggshells. Hopefully this is it.”

Because the complaint was just posted, Perdue has not yet commented, but I will ask them for comment and update this post when they do.

Nine-year-old Nowa Paye is taken to an ambulance after showing signs of the Ebola infection in the village of Freeman Reserve, about 30 miles north of Monrovia, Liberia. Jerome Delay/AP

We’ve pretty much signed off on Ebola in the United States — last week, President Obama withdrew the US troops sent to fight the disease — but in Africa, the news on the epidemic has seemed pretty good. The overall number of known cases stands at 22,894, with 9,177 deaths, far below the dire predictions made last fall that the epidemic could sicken millions.

Progress at beating the disease is stalling, though. According to the World Health Organization, the number of new cases has gone back up for two weeks in a row. Sierra Leone, now the outbreak’s epicenter, still has what the WHO calls “widespread transmission,” and on Saturday its government quarantined part of the capital. Guinea has had a spike in cases, and in several areas, mobs have attacked clinics.

The news is best from Liberia, where there were just three new cases last week compared to 65 in Guinea and 76 in Sierra Leone. Liberia was hard-hit, with 8,881 confirmed cases and 3,826 deaths — 300 cases per week at some points. But it also seems to have done the most to curb the disease’s spread: Today, schools that had been closed since last fall are supposed to open again.

Last week, though, I had the opportunity to speak to a front-line Ebola fighter in Liberia, and what he told me underlined how precarious that country’s progress is.

The government-chartered British project examining antibiotic resistance — which made such a splash in December with its prediction that untreatable resistance will kill 10 million people per year by 2050 — has produced its first set of recommendations for turning back the problem.

They come down to this: Start spending money.

The project — formally titled the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance — analyzes the funding spent directly on resistance research, and indirectly through training specialists and investing in innovation, and finds that the resources devoted by governments and the private sector are not up to the job. With the same bluntness that marked its first report, the project says: “There is a problem of chronic under-investment in both the financial and human capital needed to tackle antimicrobial resistance.”